In recent years, there have become available many diverse forms of home entertainment. These have included various forms of recreating music which have largely supplanted conventional stereophonic phonograph records such as compact discs, digital audio tapes and cassette tapes and have also included video tapes for home video cassette recorder use which is now a large and growing industry. Since any individual may well have many such discs and/or tapes, storage in the home has become a serious problem.
More particularly, the owner of such discs and or tapes must have a compact method of storage. However, it is equally well recognized that any such storage should not only keep such discs and/or tapes well organized, but also subject to prompt identification and easy access so the discs and/or tapes will not fall into disuse simply because of inconvenience. For this purpose, there have been on the market a wide variety of storage units in the form of racks.
While such racks are well suited for compact storage, they have been found to be unsatisfactory for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, they usually only allow visual inspection of a single end of a container for the discs and/or tapes which is, of course, usually a very narrow surface meaning that the user must scan the printed matter of a large number of such discs and/or tapes to identify the one being sought for use at any particular point in time. Simply stated, this is a difficult identification task which could be rendered far more simple by inspection of the front face of the container for such disks and/or tapes.
In this connection, it is well known that the containers for such disks and/or tapes usually have visually interesting art work on the front face thereof. This has long been the case with regard to stereophonic phonographic records which are stored in jackets having artwork on the cover which is oftentimes commissioned at considerable expense due to its intrinsic ability to attract attention and, thus, sales. More recently, the same artwork has been provided on the front face of containers for compact discs, digital audio tapes and cassette tapes, and similarly attractive artwork is commonly provided on video tapes for the same purpose.
Of course, not only does the artwork help identify the discs and/or tapes, but it is often sufficiently visually attractive to be desirable for open display. Thus, there has been a need for a display unit for such discs and/or tapes which would render it possible to take advantage of the attractive artwork by openly displaying it while at the same time facilitating easy identification and removal of any particular one of the discs and/or tapes for use. In addition, a display unit of this type could easily be used to great advantage by retail outlets for enhancing sales of such discs and/or tapes.
The present invention is directed to overcoming the foregoing problems and accomplishing the resulting objectives by providing a unique new display unit for consumer products.